Museo de Plantas Sagradas, Mágicas y Medicinales
Nine small rooms tracing coca, tobacco and other sacred Andean plants, with a hall devoted to biopiracy and profit.
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About this audio guide
The Museo de Plantas Sagradas in Cusco opens on a single question standing at the coca case, how one dried leaf pressed under glass ended up funding a global industry while the people who first called it sacred got nothing. It traces how Spanish colonizers first banned coca as the devil's plant, then reversed course to tax it once miners relied on it to survive brutal shifts underground, turning a sacrament into a revenue line. The museum's final room, bluntly titled Biopiracy, sits alongside eight others devoted to tobacco, San Pedro cactus and ayahuasca, all filled by the anthropologist who founded the place in two thousand eleven. Take your time at the case before that last room.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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